There’s this really big problem when it comes to working on games (or really any sort of project that lies at the intersection of engineering and design). It has nothing to do with programming or design or testing or art or sound or anything else like that.

The problem is staying motivated. This is especially bad when you are working alone, but it can even happen in groups of 2 or 3 people. Beyond that, you can always find motivation in the stuff that other people are doing, because it comes from outside of your personal drive and creativity. But in small groups or solo projects, the game becomes your baby, and then you get tired of your baby.

Sometimes this happens when you work so long on one subset of features that they sort of blur together and become the totality of the project to you. You quickly get tired of this smaller sub-problem (especially tweaking and tweaking and tweaking), then get tired of the game without realizing there is other interesting work to be done.

Or maybe you realize that there is a lot of stuff to do on the project, but you’ve been working on it so long without much visible or marked improvement that you begin to despair. Maybe the project will never flower, you think. Maybe your efforts will never be used to the full extent they were designed for.

Wherever this loss of motivation comes from, there is one piece of advice I heard that really helps me. It boils down to this: if you keep wishing your game was awesome, make it awesome. Add in that feature you keep thinking about, but keep putting off because there is more important framework-laying to do. Or take some time off and mess around with that one technical gimmick (shader, hardware stuff, multi-threading, proc-gen, or what have you). When you feel yourself losing motivation, give yourself permission to go off and get it back. Don’t soldier on, because your project will inevitably end up on the dump heap with all the other projects you abandoned.

The only problem is, everyone (including myself) always says that adding eye-candy and little trinkets to your project prematurely is a Bad Idea. If you make your game cool by adding eye-candy, the wisdom goes, then your game is no longer cool because of the gameplay (you know, the point of a game). Arguments about whether gameplay is important not-withstanding, if adding a few bits of visual indulgence saves your game from succumbing to ennui, then by all means, add the cool things!

Like this:

I haven’t written in a while here, but there’s nothing like a good, old-fashioned rant to get back into the swing of things.

I recently saw this article pop up on my Facebook feed. I have to say, it was very disappointing to read.

I mean, seriously? You’re going to waste my time with this bullshit? There are legitimate things to criticize about Christianity; this is not one of those. According to the fevered logic of the article, the fact that the Bible went through the process of translation, the Bible is made up. That’s basically what it comes down to.

To explain more thoroughly, researchers recently found a draft of a translation of some of the apocryphal books in English for the King James Bible. That’s it. So apparently the fact that God didn’t come down and tell scholars how to translate it into English means that the Bible isn’t the divine word of God. I guess it was written by a committee of Jews or something?

The hivemind has taken over at this point: every half-witted Internet denizen and his dog want to take jabs at religion, because it’s the hip thing to do. But this is just sad. This smells of a writer with an IQ of 90 and a looming deadline. This is like learning that Obama isn’t legally allowed to run for a third term in the 2016 election, then turning around and questioning why he was ever allowed to run for office in the first place in that case.

It’s a non-sequitur that is both hilarious and sad, and really says something about the state of the media and information dispersal in this day and age.